Starship Tomahawk (The Hive Invasion Book 2) (20 page)

Hammett shook his head. He felt as if his skull was full of static, a churning storm of frustration and impotent rage. "I'm sorry, what?"

"He ordered me to Deirdre, and you didn't even react." Kaur glowered at him. "I was waiting for you to jump in. I thought we'd be arguing for the next hour."

"Would it have done any good?"

Kaur opened her mouth, then closed it.

"No," said Hammett, answering his own question. "A good commander picks his battles."

"But-"

"Methods are many," said Hammett, "for the flaying of felines."

"What?"

Hammett chuckled grimly. "There's more than one way to skin a cat."

Kaur didn't speak, just stared at him, dark eyebrows drawn together, waiting for Hammett to explain.

"We know roughly where the Hive fleet is gathered," Hammett said. "Or maybe it's the place where they have a Gate of their own. At any rate, we know more or less where it is. What direction, anyway." He started to tilt his head to bring up a menu on his implants, then stopped himself. Even after all this time, the habits of a lifetime lingered.

"They always come from the direction of that pentagon constellation," he said. "They flee in the same direction. It's where they're hiding out. It's where the next attack will come from."

Kaur said, "Okay …"

"If I was still in command," Hammett said, "I would send you out in the
Achilles
tomorrow early. I'd have you make a reconnaissance flight in the direction of that constellation. I'd gather a little information and figure out what to do next."

Kaur nodded. "And?"

"And that's exactly what you'll do, tomorrow at 08:00. We'll get what we want, and we'll do it without antagonizing the Colonel. We'll build up a bit of good will instead, by following his orders."

"But he thinks the
Achilles
is going to Deirdre."

Hammett shrugged. "What's a few degrees here or there? Do you think there's a person in the entire EDF who can point toward the Deirdre system? Besides, it would be foolish to jump directly toward Deirdre. You'd give away your intentions to the enemy. It just makes sense to start out by making a few jumps in a different direction."

Kaur stared at him for a moment. "No insubordination required."

"None at all," Hammett said. "We'll be model officers. We'll do every last thing we're told."

"You have a devious streak, Captain."

Hammett raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. "This, from the commander of the corvette that kept unrepairing itself?"

Kaur grinned. "Touché. I'm going to see a lady about some fruit. Want me to send some to the
Tomahawk
?"

"Please," said Hammett. "Get me some mangoes if you can. They're delicious."

Kaur nodded and walked away, leaving Hammett staring at the wall of the terminal with unfocused eyes.
Has it really come to this? I have to bullshit a civilian to be allowed to scout the enemy, all so I can try to defend a colony the Navy has abandoned?

How much longer can I keep pretending the Navy isn't broken? How long can I maintain even a pretense of following orders? How long until I get an order I have to refuse?

And what happens then?

When Ariadne hung like a pumpkin in the sky behind the corvette, Kaur called the engine room and told Schwartz, her engineer, to start powering up the wormhole generator.

"Why did you wait?" O'Hare said suspiciously. He'd taken over the captain's chair. Kaur, not wanting to bump Samson from the Tactical station, stood. "We've been up here for twenty minutes."

"It's not good to open a wormhole too close to a planet," Kaur said patiently. "And it takes time to line the ship up properly without computer assistance."

O'Hare didn't speak, just frowned at her. They had wrangled a bit before taking off, O'Hare wanting to give every order until he realized he had no idea of the small details of running the bridge of a corvette.

I must not sigh. I must not roll my eyes. A good commander chooses her battles.
"We'll jump shortly. No one is shirking their duty."
Quite the opposite. We're moving closer to the enemy, in contravention of your orders.

Hopkins said, "General quarters, Ma'am?"

"Give it a couple of minutes," Kaur said. She wanted to put the crew on alert a minute or so before the jump, so they'd still be sharp when the ship went through the wormhole. The problem was, although she knew how long it took the
Achilles
to charge its generator, she wasn't sure exactly how much time had passed.
We need mechanical timepieces. We haven't got a single working clock on the entire ship. Well, there's O'Hare's implants.
The thought of using the self-important EDF man as a glorified grandfather clock amused her.
I wonder if I could get him to announce the time every fifteen minutes?

"Hurry up and jump," said O'Hare. "You can't just hang around here where it's safe. I won't stand for it."

That time Kaur let a small sigh escape her. "Sound General Quarters, Mr. Hopkins."

A buzzer sounded.

"Well?" snapped O'Hare. "What are you waiting for?"

"The laws of physics, Colonel," Kaur said tiredly. "We'll jump as soon as the wormhole opens."

The jump happened without direct intervention from the bridge. A spotter in the forward observation room, waiting with a phone at his ear, saw the wormhole open ahead of the ship and informed Engineering. The corvette jumped a moment later.

"Forward observation reports no enemy activity," Hopkins said. "Aft observation reports clear. Dorsal observation also clear."

Kaur released a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.
What I wouldn’t give for proper scanners.
"Hold position," she said, and walked to the port window. She peered outside, looking for stars that vanished and reappeared, occluded by moving ships.

"We need to jump again," O'Hare said. "We need to generate another wormhole." When Kaur didn't speak he said, "Answer me!"

"Did you ask a question, Sir?" Kaur said without turning. "Those sounded like statements." Giving the crew an example of disrespect to follow wasn't the brightest thing a commander could do, but she didn't care.

"Contact!" Hopkins interrupted. "Port observation reports movement. Ten degrees above horizontal, about fifteen degrees port."

Kaur brought her hands up, measuring the angles, then peered at the stars. Rough estimates of angles still left her a huge swathe of sky to search, and she fumed yet again at the lack of decent electronic tools.

Then she caught her breath. There, just below the lowest star in the pentagon constellation, a point of light moved. She cupped her hands around her eyes to block out ambient light, her hands not quite touching the window.

One of the stars wasn't quite stationary. That was all she could say for sure.

"Helm. Bring us about. Fifteen degrees to port and ten degrees up."

"What do you think you're doing?" O'Hare demanded. "Your orders are to go to Deirdre."

Kaur looked at him, an indignant clown of a man almost spilling from his seat in agitation, and jerked a thumb at the pentagon. "The enemy is that way."

"You have your orders! I won't have you shirking your duty."

A bark of laughter escaped Kaur before she could stop it. "Do you mean to tell me that flying toward the enemy is shirking my duty? Colonel? Do you really insist that we fly away from Hive ships?" More words rose, angry, contemptuous words, but she bit them back.
Choose your battles
.

O'Hare glared at her, red-faced, apparently at a loss for words.

"What if I insist we continue toward Deirdre?" Kaur said sarcastically. "Then you can call me a coward and order me to advance on the enemy. We can both get what we want." She turned toward the helmsman. "Set a course for-"

"You will engage the enemy." O'Hare looked as if he was biting into a lemon.

"If you insist," Kaur said, and turned her back on the man. She stared out at the distant point of light, battling her fury.
Pull yourself together, Meena. You're about to fly into danger. You might be in combat in a matter of minutes. Don’t go in thinking about how you'd like to strangle your commanding officer. Focus!

"Ready," said the helmsman.

Minutes ticked past.
This would be a great opportunity to shove that idiot out an airlock. Who'd ever know? Focus, Meena. Focus.

"Wormhole is ready," said Carver at Operations.

"Open wormhole."

Energy shimmered for a moment in front of the ship, and the deck surged under her feet as the
Achilles
accelerated.

They jumped.

O'Hare hopped to his feet and hurried to the port window, where he cupped his hands against the steelglass and peered outside. He'd be leaving handprints on the window, but if that was the worst thing he did on this mission Kaur would count herself lucky.

"All observation posts report no close enemy activity," Carver said.

"I can't see anything either," said O'Hare, face still pressed to the window.

"Dorsal observation reports movement to starboard," Carver said after a moment. "Thirty degrees from forward. A hair below the horizon."

Kaur strode to the port window. At first she saw nothing. Then several stars vanished, and she leaned forward.

"Dorsal observation says there's a dozen ships, size unknown," Carver reported. "She says there's a rock, too. A big one." The observation posts were equipped with telescopes. They would be getting a far more detailed view of the enemy. After a moment Carver added, "Best range estimate is fifty thousand kilometers."

Either they haven't seen us, or we're too far away to react to. Or they're jumping toward us and we're about to be overwhelmed.
A wormhole jump would allow the enemy to move faster than the light that was reaching the telescopes. They would literally arrive before the
Achilles
saw them leave.

"I need a size estimate on that rock," Kaur said. "I need a velocity and bearing, too. I'm sure it's not just sitting still."

"What's happening?" O'Hare said, sounding frightened. He polished the window with his sleeve while looking over at Kaur.

"They've got a rock," Kaur said. "Probably an asteroid of some sort. They're pushing it toward Ariadne." She grimaced. "When the colonists fired that gun they painted a great big target on themselves. Now the aliens are going to drop a bloody big rock on them."

O'Hare lowered his arm, leaving a long smear on the steelglass. All his bluster was gone. "Can they do that? I mean, the gun is pretty small. Can they really hit it from here?"

"They don't have to hit the gun," Kaur said. "They don't even have to hit the crater. Hell, if the rock is big enough, they don't even need to hit the right hemisphere. They can devastate the planet completely with any impact, if the rock is big and they get it moving fast enough."

O'Hare stared at her, aghast.

"There was a bit of that sort of thing at the tail end of the Outer Settlements War," Kaur said bleakly. "Small rocks, mostly, moving really fast. They did incredible damage." She'd seen vids of the aftermath. Hammett would have seen it first-hand. You could undo a hundred years of terraforming with one strike.

"What do we do?" O'Hare said hoarsely.

"I guess that's up to you," Kaur snapped. "You probably want us to fly on to Deirdre and pretend this isn't happening."

O'Hare turned away from the window, staring at Kaur with his lower lip sticking out like a petulant child. Finally he said, "What do you recommend?"

"We need to learn as much as we can about this rock. We need to know how big it is and how fast they're accelerating it. Then we need to return to Ariadne. It will take the
Tomahawk
and the
Achilles
working together to give us any kind of chance of saving the colony."

O'Hare stared at her, silent and sullen.

"I'm not leaving eighteen thousand people to die while I fly off to Deirdre," Kaur said.

O'Hare dropped his gaze. "Fine," he muttered. "Take us back to Ariadne."

"Soon," replied Kaur. "We need more information first."

They spent an hour flying parallel to the moving rock, doing their best with clumsy manual instruments to calculate the rock's velocity. Undamaged scanners would have told them everything they needed to know in a few minutes. Instead they made rough guesses. By the end of an hour Kaur knew little more than that the rock was moving quickly, and it was still accelerating.

"Let's get home," she said at last. For all she knew the aliens would open a wormhole in front of the rock and drive it into the planet in a matter of minutes. It was time to get back to Ariadne and get started on a solution. "Line us up."

"Ready," said the helmsman after a minute.

"Open a wormhole."

A long moment passed, and Kaur gave Carver an annoyed glance. "Mr. Carver. Where's my wormhole?"

Carver, a telephone handset pressed to his ear, gave her a helpless shrug. "Mechanical problem, Ma'am. Power's not reaching the ring."

Kaur closed her eyes, picturing the wormhole generating system. The wormhole would be projected by a ring of superconducting material placed behind heavy shielding in the nose of the ship. It needed fantastic amounts of energy, which it drew directly from the main engines. In a cruiser every major wire and cable would run through the heart of the ship, where the bulk of the ship would protect it. A corvette was too small for such measures, though. Inevitably a lot of key systems and components had to be close to the skin of the ship.

The main power cable connecting the engines to the projection ring ran along the dorsal hull. Right about where the alien ball had penetrated the hull plates.

"We've got power again," Carver announced.

"Jump us," Kaur ordered, and stood. When Carver said, "Jump complete," Kaur gave him the conn and stepped into the corridor.

A fat power cable snaked along the deck plates, and a technician hurried past, saying, "Sorry about this, Ma'am."

"It's fine," Kaur assured him, and moved aft. She found the spot where she'd disabled the alien machine. One ceiling panel was missing. Another panel, badly tattered, had several fresh rivets holding it in place. She could see the underside of a steel patch welded over the hole in the hull.

The same technician came down the corridor, and Kaur held a hand up, stopping him. "The main power cable running to the projection ring. Where is it, exactly?"

The young sailor looked up at the ceiling. "Should be about here, Ma'am." He gestured with his hand, indicating a line running forward to aft along the edge of the corridor ceiling.

"Are you certain?"

"I can check, Ma'am." The technician stretched up and twisted a couple of small handles on a ceiling panel a little darker than the others. The panel swung down, suspended by hinges on one side. "Yup," the man said. "There it is."

Kaur squinted into the exposed space above the panel. She could see several plastic tubes, an emergency force field generator, and a steel rib. There was also a thick power cable held to the panel above by plastic clamps.

"Thank you," Kaur said, and moved aside so the technician could close the panel. The cable was a good forty centimeters from the spot where she'd destroyed the alien machine.

Which meant either the power failure was unrelated to the alien machine, or the ship had a much more serious problem than she'd suspected. She imagined that alien ball spawning smaller machines, mouse-sized devices that kept on burrowing until they hit something vital. There could be a dozen tiny robots destroying her ship from the inside.

Unless they were even smaller. Beetle-sized, still big enough to burrow into a cable and cause a short. There could be hundreds of the things.

"Bloody hell."

"Ma'am?" The technician gave her an alarmed look.

"I don't think we're done with surprise equipment failures," Kaur said. "Keep your eyes open."

"Yes, Ma'am."

Kaur returned to the bridge. Was it safe to jump again? Well, it was hardly safe to remain in deep space with a compromised ship. She'd have to jump again and hope for the best.